Reading List

ECON 30250

Economic History

 

Readings with a (R) are required and those with a (P) are readings for which students may write a précis.  Those marked with a (E) are papers for a précis that are better suited for students that have had econometrics.  Readings with an (S) and supplemental readings.

 

 

 

1.          The Purpose and Goals of Economic History (January 20:  Melissa Thomasson, Miami University)

 

Abramitzky, Ran. 2015. "Economics and the Modern Economic Historian." Journal of Economic History, 75(4): 1240-1251. (R)

 

 

2.          The Accidental Health Care System (January 20:  Melissa Thomasson, Miami University)

 

            House/Senate Government Affairs Committee Testimony of Melissa Thomasson, September 2017.  (R)

 

Thomasson, Melissa. 2002.  "From Sickness to Health: The Twentieth-Century Development of U.S. Health Insurance." Explorations in Economic History, 39(3), 233-253. (R) (P) (E)

 

Thomasson, Melissa. 2004. "Early Evidence of an Adverse Selection Death Spiral?" Explorations in Economic History, 41(4): 313-328. (R) (P) (E)

 

 

3.          The Great Depression (January 27:  Jason Long, Wheaton College)

 

                        Peter Temin. 1989.  Lessons from the Great Depression, Cambridge MA:  MIT Press.

                                    Lecture 1:  The Spoils of War: The Cause of the Great Depression (R) (P)

            Lecture 2:  The Midas Touch: The Spread of the Great Depression (R) (P)

 

Temin, Peter. 2010.   The Great Recession and the Great Depression.   Daedalus 139(4): 115-124. (R) (P)

 

Long, Jason, and Henry Siu. 2018.   Refugees from Dust and Shrinking Land: Tracking the Dust Bowl Migrants, Journal of Economic History, 78(4):1001-1033. (R) (P) (E)

 

 

4.          Health from an Historical Perspective Economic (February 3:  Bill Evans)

a.        The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death in Europe and the US

Cutler, David, Angus Deaton, and Adriana Lleras-Muney, 2006.  The Determinants of Mortality. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 20(3), 97-120.  (R)

 

McKeown, Thomas, The Role of Medicine: Dream, Mirage or Nemesis, London, England: Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust; 1976, Chapters 3 and Chapter 4, pages 29-65, plus Chapter 8.  What do we learn from figures 8.1, 8.5, 8.8-8.10, 8.14?  (R) (P) (Write one precis on all three chapters).

 

Fogel, Robert, The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 1-42. (R) (P)

 

Cutler, David and Grant Miller,  The Role of Public Health Improvements in Health Advances:  The Twentieth-Century United States.   Demography 42(1), 2005, 1-22. (R) (P) (E)

 

b.       Health and development:  macro and micro perspectives

Bloom, David E. and David Canning,  The Health and Wealth of Nations, Science, 2000, 287(5456), 1207-1208. (R)

 

Sachs, Jeffrey, and Pia Malaney,  The Economic and Social Burden of Malaria, Nature, 2002, 415(6872), 680-685. (R)

 

Acemoglu, Daron, and Simon Johnson, 2007.  "Disease and Development: The Effect of Life Expectancy on Economic Growth," Journal of Political Economy, 115 (6), December, 925-985 (Focus on Pages 925-945). (R) (P)

 

Cutler, David M., Winnie Fung, Michael Kremer, Monica Singhal, and Tom Vogl, 2010.   Early-life Malaria Exposure and Adult Outcomes: Evidence from Malaria Eradication in India, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2(2), 72-94. (R) (P) (E)

 

  

 

5.          Persistence and Path Dependence (Hoyt Bleakley, University of Michigan)

 

a.        Introduction (February 10)

 

David, P. A. 1985.  Clio and the Economics of QWERTY. American Economic Review. 75 (2), pp. 332 337. (R)

 

Liebowitz, S. J. and Stephen E. Margolis. 1990.  The Fable of the Keys. The Journal of Law & Economics. 33(1): 1-25. (S)

 

 

b.         Geography:  Conditions and Coordination (February 10)

 

Semple, Ellen Churchill, American History and Its Geographic Conditions (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903). (S)

 

Davis, D. and D. Weinstein. 2002.  Bones, bombs, and break points: The geography of economic activity. American Economic Review. 92 (5): 1269 1289. (R) (P)

 

Bleakley, Hoyt and Jeffrey Lin. 2012.  Portage and Path Dependence, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 127:587-644.  (R) (P)

 

Villarreal, Carlos. 2015.  Where the Other Half Lives: Evidence on the Origin and Persistence of Poor Neighborhoods from New York City 1830-2012. Working Paper.  (R)

 

Krugman, P. 1991.  History versus expectations. Quarterly Journal of Economics. 106(2): 651 667.  (S)

 

Rauch, J. E. 1993.  Does history matter only when it matters little? The case of city-industry location. Quarterly Journal of Economics. 108(3):843 867. (S)

 

 

c.       Inequality in the Midst of Free Land (February 17)

 

Turner, Frederick Jackson. 1893.  The Significance of the Frontier in American History. A paper read at the meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, 12 July 1893, during the World Columbian Exposition. (Excerpt by Wisconsin Historical Society)  (R) (P)

 

Kenneth L. Sokoloff and Stanley L. Engerman, 2000.  Institutions, Factors, Endowments, and Paths of Development in the New World, Journal of Economic Perspectives 14(3):217-232. (R) (P)

 

Taylor, Alan M. 1995. Review of  Frontier Development: Land, Labour, and Capital on the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada, 1890-1914, by Jeremy Adelman. The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 55(3):729-731. (R)

 

Garc´1
a   Jimeno, Camilo, and James A. Robinson.  The Myth of the Frontier,    Chapter 2 in Understanding Long-Run Economic Growth: Geography, Institutions, and the Knowledge Economy, D. Costa and N. Lamoreaux, eds., 2009. (S)

 

James, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins; Toussaint L Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. 2nd ed., Vintage Books, 1963. (S)

 

Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. 2000.  Political Losers as a Barrier to Economic Development. American Economic Review, 90(2): 126-130.  (R)

 

Bleakley, Hoyt, and Joseph Ferrie. 2016.  Shocking Behavior: Random Wealth in Antebellum Georgia and Human Capital Across Generations, Quarterly Journal of Economics 131(3): 1455-1495. (R) (P) (E)

 

 

6.          Wealth and Poverty of Nations (February 24:  Jason Long, Wheaton College)

 

Mokry, Joel. 1992.The Level of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (New York: Oxford University Press), Chapters 1 and 9.

 

North, Douglas. 1991. "Institutions." Journal of Economic Perspectives 5(1): 97-112. (R) (P)

 

Acemoglu, Daron, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson. 2001. "The Colonial Oriins of Comparative Development." American Economic Review 91(5): 1369-1401 (R) (P) (S)

 

 

 

 

 

7.          Financial Bubbles and Crashes in World History (March 2, 16, 23, 30:  Joe Davis, Vangaurd)

 

The readings for this section are all from Aliber, Robert Z., and Charles P. Kindleberger. Manias, Panics, and Crashes:  A History of Financial Crisis. Seventh edition.  Palgrave Macmillan:  New York.  The book is available Amazon in e-reader format for $17.  

 

a.      Asset pricing and financial returns (March 2) 

       Reading: Kindleberger, Chapters 1, 2, 15 (other materials provided in class)

i.        Financial assets: Historical performance

ii.      Overview of concepts of fundamental value and risk premia

iii.     Market volatility & market cycles (phases)

 

b.     Week 2: Asset  bubbles and manias (March 16)

       Reading: Kindleberger, Chapters 3-6

i.        Commonalities

ii.      Examples in world history (from tulips to housing to bitcoin)

a.      The 1920s

b.     Housing in the 2000s

c.      Statistical identification (exercise & dataset)

 

c.      Week 3: Financial crises: When bubbles burst (march 23)

       Reading: Kindleberger, Chapters 7-9

i.        Types of crises

I.      Global examples since 1800

ii.      Consequences

a.      Short- and long-run economic effects

b.     Recessions & depressions

c.      1929 vs 2008

 

b.     Week #4: Detecting crises before they happen (March 30)

                        Reading: Kindleberger, Chapters 11, 12, 14

i.        Role of policy

ii.      Critiquing past policy responses (essay)

iii.     Ex ante prediction

iv.    Econometric models (class exercise)

v.      Bubbles today & tomorrow

 

 

8.          The New Deal (April 6: Price Fishback, University of Arizona)

 

Fishback, Price.  2017.  How Successful was the New Deal?  The Microeconomic Impact of New Deal Spending and Lending Policies in the 1930s.   Journal of Economic Literature 55(4): 1-51. (R) (P)

 

Fishback, Price, and Valentina Kachnovskaya. 2015.   The Multiplier for Federal Spending in the States During the Great Depression.   The Journal of Economic History 71(1): 125-162. (R) (P) (E)

 

Taylor, Jason. 2011.  Work-sharing During the Great Depression:  Did the  President s Reemployment Agreement Promote Reemployment? Economica 78: 133-158. (R) (P) (E)

 

 

9.        Immigration in US History (April 20: Karen Clay, Carnegie-Mellon University)

 

Please watch this YouTube video first:  (R)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRhjqqe750A

 

Abramitzky, Ran, and Leah Platt Boustan. 2017.  Immigration in American Economic History.   Journal of Economic Literature 55(4): 1311-1345 (R) (P)

 

Goldin, Goldin. 1994.  The Political Economy of Immigration Restriction in the United States, 1890 to 1921, in The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy, eds. Claudia Goldin and Gary D. Libecap (Chicago: University of Chicago Press for NBER), 223-57 (R) (P) (E)

 

Abramitzky, Ran, Leah Platt Boustan, and Katherine Eriksson. 2014. "A Nation of Immigrants: Assimilation and Economic Outcomes in the Age of Mass Migration." Journal of Political Economy 122(3): 467-506. (R) (P) (E)

 

 

10.        Infrastructure, Institutions, and Development in 19th century America (April 27, John Wallis, University of Maryland)

 

Wallis, John Joseph.  2005.  Constitutions, Corporations, and Corruption: American States and Constitutional Change, 1842 to 1852. Journal of Economic History, 65(1): 211-256. (R) (P)

 

Wallis, John Joseph. 2003.  The Property Tax as a Coordinating Device:  Financing Indiana s Mammoth Internal Improvement System, 1835-1942.   Explorations in Economic History 40: 223-250. (R) (P) (E)

 

Lamoreaux, Naomi, and Wallis, John Joseph.  2019.  General Laws and the Mid-Nineteenth Century and the Transformation of American Political Economy:  Massachusetts, New York, Indiana, and Beyond.   Working Paper. (R) (P)